For this assignment, you will create a poster using Google Slides to present information on the CFTR protein and cystic fibrosis. The poster should tell a story with these components:

  1. What is CF? What is the biological basis of CF, generally?
  2. What are genes, proteins, mutations?
  3. What are specific dysfunctions addressed by drugs?
  4. What new drugs have been developed and how do these treat these specific dysfunction?

The poster should include:

Multiple sections

These sections should follow the components of the story above

  1. Cystic Fibrosis. What is CF? What is the etiology of CF? Google the word “etiology”! This section should introduce the CFTR protein, the general function of the protein, and the function of the protein in making watery secretions.
  2. Genetics of CF. What is a protein? What is a gene? How is CF inherited? This section should include classic Mendelian inheritance.
  3. Specific dysfunction of CFTR protein. What are the specific dysfunctions in CFTR that biotech companies are addressing?
  4. What are the new treatments of CFTR that have been developed in response to the basic science discovered and outlined above.

Nice images

  1. Use images downloaded from the web to tell your story. Use google search to find additional images. You may want to use modify the images to help tell your story, for example, add call-out boxes of text with arrows! Or other nice poster tricks.
  2. Be sure to include the source web address of all images!

The text needs to be your text

Copying and copying-with-modification is plagiarism. Do not plagiarize. This includes copying-with-modification, which is copying and pasting a sentence or paragraph with minor modifications to word choice or rearrangement of clauses etc.

It is very hard for students or anyone that is not an expert in an area to write about a subject using their own description and not copying or copying-with-modification the description written by experts. It is hard because when we don’t understand a concept fully it is hard to describe it without using the copied descriptions. Yeh, its hard. But work at it! Its more important at this stage to have less formal description and lack of clarity than plagiarised text.

Resources

  1. CFTR modulator types
  2. Modulator therapies
  3. Vertex Pharmaceuticals: Humanizing drug discovery

Nature articles. These articles are written for other professional scientists and especially biologists, but not experts in the field. You should be able to see this article if you are logged into your USM account. You may have to log in through your library account

  1. How much protein function needs to be restored in cystic fibrosis?
  2. Cystic fibrosis drugs target the malformed proteins at the root of the disease
  3. Research round-up: Cystic fibrosis